> I was trying to setting up a collection of scanned images of Chinese
> books. I first tried to use the plain format for the document
> metadata. If I use Chinese in the .item file, GLI will not process
> the file, but I add some English text in front of Chinese, it would
> work. Then I tought maybe if I use the XML format it would work.
> Wrong. XML format doesn't work at all, even if I only have Chinese
> text in the .item file. Perl would die a fatal death.

What encoding(s) did you use? I'm not sure but I wouldn't be surprised if the plugin assumes that the .item file is in utf-8, instead of big5 or gbk.